About Us

Est. 2015

Unfunded List, Inc. is a 501c3 nonprofit whose charitable mission is to educate the public about philanthropy.

We provide rigorous feedback to proposal authors. We also write articles, record podcasts, and produce videos and webinars about philanthropy, grant-making, and the nonprofit sector. We host symposiums on important philanthropy topics as well as a regular series of events, summits, and partner webinars for evaluators and other proposal reviewers.

At Unfunded List we believe that great ideas deserve great feedback and that philanthropy can be inclusive by including more people.

Staff

Dave Moss

Unfunded List Founder

Dave Moss founded the Unfunded List in 2015 after over a decade of professional experience in both grant-making and grant-writing. Over his career he had the pleasure to be involved with the launch of the Nexus Summit, the Media for Social Impact Summit, the “It’s On Us” Campaign, The Slingshot Fund, and several successful activist and legislative campaigns. He understands the unique frustrations on both sides and founded the Unfunded List to educate the next generation of social entrepreneurs about philanthropy. He also hosts the highly-rated philanthropy podcast Open Door Philanthropy featuring dozens of lengthy, in-depth interviews with leading philanthropists and nonprofit professionals. He is a proud resident of Waterville, Maine the town where he was born.

You can contact Dave at [email protected].

Margaret Chapman

Managing Director (On Sabbatical beginning January 2022)

Margaret Chapman has managed budgets from $50,000 to over $50 million annually including START International, Inc., the George Washington Cancer Institute, and various projects for the Pew Charitable Trusts. Most importantly, In 2017, she helped the Unfunded List successfully file for 501c3 status and serves as our director of finance and administration while providing crucial support to our evaluation committee. She is the Provost of Unfunded University and holds an MBA and MA both from George Washington University. You can contact Margaret at [email protected].

Board of Directors

Our Committees

Knowledge & Process

Governance & Advancement

History & Culture

Founding Board of Directors

We are forever grateful to our founding board of directors who saw us through our formation and original program design process. All affiliations are listed for identification purposes only.

In 2015, founder Dave Moss started the Unfunded List in order to harness the power of the honorable mention and to bring added attention, recognition and funding to ideas that would otherwise have gone unnoticed.

We founded the Unfunded List with a simple mission: to provide feedback and recognition to unfunded grant proposals. What started as an informal effort to support social entrepreneurs with feedback has evolved into a vision of unlocking the value of an abundant and underutilized resource – well-conceived but unfunded proposals. There is no shortage of great ideas and potential solutions out there, but new programs need better support and the funding community needs a better way to identify and move new solutions forward.

Every submission receives detailed feedback on their proposal from our talented Evaluation Committee. Feedback could include introductions to other potential funders, suggested improvements to the proposal, potential partnerships, etc. and will be tailored to each individual application. Proposals from small nonprofits that have been submitted yet gone unfunded might also be published to the Unfunded List.

How does our feedback process work?

Unfunded change makers submit their best and most recent fundraising materials.

We assign their materials to a hand selected team of evaluators from our Evaluation Committee.

We compile the team’s feedback into one comprehensive report for each submission.

We share the feedback reports with each participating organization and offer a follow up consultation with our staff about the feedback they received.